YouTube’s monthly audience in Russia is now about 96 million people.
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By the end of this week, YouTube download speed on desktop computers may drop to 40%, and by the end of next week – to 70%. This measure will only affect desktop versions. It will not affect mobile communications for now, State Duma deputy Alexander Khinshtein said this on his Telegram channel on Thursday.
“The ‘downgrading’ of YouTube is a forced step, directed not against Russian users, but against the administration of a foreign resource, which still believes it can violate and ignore our legislation with impunity,” the head of the Duma Committee on Information Policy explained.
According to him, the summer period was specially chosen to “bring them to their senses”, when most people are on holiday and in their country houses and use mobile devices to access the Internet.
Server wear and tear
Recall that two weeks ago there were reports that video hosting would start to work more slowly due to the wear and tear of telecommunications equipment in Russia. We are talking about special servers that Google (the owner of the resource) transferred for use to Russian providers, but did not update them for the past two years. These servers facilitate the download of content because they are located within the country and do not load cross-border communication backbones.
Khinshtein, however, did not explain exactly why YouTube would slow down in the coming days. Even if it were only for technical reasons, it is unlikely that the load decrease would be so fast. The wear and tear of the servers is a gradual process. And the restrictions by Roskomnadzor are still unknown.
Responding to channel deletion
“Everything that is happening is a consequence of the anti-Russian hosting policy, which systematically removes the channels of our public figures (bloggers, journalists, artists), whose position differs from the Western point of view,” Alexander Khinshtein explained.
Let us remind you that, according to Roskomnadzor, 83 Russian channels have been blocked from hosting on the platform since the beginning of this year alone. These include both state media and the pages of Russian writers, artists and athletes. For example, singers Oleg Gazmanov and Yulia Chicherina, as well as gymnast Nikita Nagorny.
Where to find content?
According to Mediascope, YouTube’s monthly audience in Russia is now about 96 million people. And 56 million of them use the service every day.
– The future fate of YouTube in Russia depends solely on it. If the administration of the resource does not change its policy and does not start complying with our laws, nothing good awaits it here, – Alexander Khinstein threatened.
According to him, alternative sites are developing more than actively.
– YouTube is just one of the applications, one of the software products that are not controlled from abroad. And they harm people and the state. Now in Russia there are four good products that allow doing approximately the same thing,” Leonty Bukshtein, editor-in-chief of the Internet portal Mobile Telecommunications, told Komsomolskaya Pravda radio.
In particular, we are talking about platforms such as Rutube, VK Video, Zen and Telegram. Most Russian bloggers have pages on all these resources and duplicate content there.
QUESTION FROM THE EDGE
What about cats and country enthusiasts?
YouTube is owned by Google. The control levers are made in the USA. Therefore, the hosting can remove channels it doesn’t like. Russia cannot take retaliatory measures. For example, you can’t just block political channels that violate the legislation of the Russian Federation, but leave channels about sports, gossip, cats, and tricks of rural life. For our part, we can only slow down all content.
But the good news is that this is just a slowdown and not a complete blocking of video hosting. That is, you will be able to watch the video, but not online, but rather waiting a bit for it to load.
